Tag Archive for: indesign

One Tool to Rule Them All: Adobe Bridge

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Most people think Adobe Bridge is just for photographers. Not so! If you use InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop, you owe it to yourself to learn how this digital asset manager can make your life so much easier.

Adobe Bridge is just waiting for its chance to save you time by cutting through the clutter of files and applications. In this session, you’ll learn how to use Bridge to streamline graphics production workflows.

This session includes:

  • Using Bridge to inspect InDesign documents
  • How anyone can use Bridge for free
  • Using Bridge shortcuts to process many files rapidly
  • Speeding up the process of gathering project files
  • Why metadata is the key to smooth workflows
  • Batch processing the easy way

Watch a special Sneak Peek of this session:

InDesign for Marketing Design

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Why reinvent the wheel? You already know InDesign, the world’s best page-layout tool, so why not expand your definition of “page” to include a social media image! Explore how you can build artwork, automatically resize layouts, maintain brand identity, and export for the web and social media—right at home in InDesign.

Don’t miss your chance to learn how to:

  • Import a spreadsheet file – with text and images – to InDesign and create multiple digital ads for a marketing campaign that can be exported as merged document
  • Leverage carousels: Set up your InDesign document to create social media carousels for Instagram and LinkedIn – exporting two different ways
  • Create a social media campaign in one, yes one, InDesign document! Multiple pages sized for each social platform in the campaign. Also learn best practices for exporting

Saving Time in InDesign with Anchored Objects

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Get ready to have your mind blown with both practical and imaginative ways to save time with anchored objects in InDesign. This session is a must for anyone creating catalogs, manuals, or any document with threaded text and related, location-specific graphics.

Laurie will share real world struggles and anchored object solutions, such as how to:

  • Hang a photo or icon next to a topic in a manual
  • Anchor an icon or graphic inside a table cell
  • Anchor a photo in a story and control the text wrap
  • Anchor a quote or comment box into a story
  • Create an object style that will allow you to anchor graphics precisely with one click

Watch a special Sneak Peek of this session:

Three Minutes Max: InDesign

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This crowd favorite is back! Don’t miss this fun-filled, action-packed, highly educational, and mind-blowing session: Three Minutes Max!

Each of our instructors will have no more than three minutes to share their favorite InDesign tip—then you get to vote for your favorite!

In past years, some of the best tips have been held for this session… so you don’t want to miss it!

Next Steps in Interactive Documents for Sales and Marketing

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Creating interactive content with InDesign is only the first half of the job: You also need to distribute it! In this session you’ll learn about “Sales Enablement Platforms” and how they are ideal for InDesign-generated content. These apps enable you to easily distribute interactive sales and marketing materials to your sales team, ensuring that they have easy access to all the latest content for customer-facing presentations.

You will learn how to:

  • Manage your content and ensure it is used by the right people
  • Guarantee that the latest, up-to-date content is always available on every device used by the sales team, even when they are offline
  • Distribute interactive “leave behind” and follow-up content to customers that they can view in a web browser
  • Measure results: Which piece of content is used most often? Which results in more customer engagement?

Putting It All Together: Styles, Scripts, GREP, and More

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If you’ve ever received a messy Microsoft Word file and needed to format it quickly in InDesign, then this session is for you. We’ll take some messy text and show how to automate the clean-up process, format the content, and make it look great in InDesign.

Topics include:

  • Using pre-saved Find/Change queries to make changes to data and text
  • Setting up Next Styles and Nested Styles to format text quickly and accurately
  • Taking advantage of GREP and scripts to work even faster (It’s not as hard as it seems!)
  • Creating custom shortcuts for tasks you never even thought you could assign a keystroke to
  • Using object styles to maximize your efficiency

Adding Interactive Elements to Your InDesign Docs

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If you’re curious how InDesign can create engaging interactive documents, this is the session for you! InDesign has a rich toolset for adding buttons and animation. But to really use these features well, you sometimes need to think outside the box. In this session, we’ll look at the “trickery” involved in producing a series of interactive effects, using some obvious and not-so-obvious techniques. If you’ve tried InDesign’s interactive features and found them frustrating, this session will make you want to take a second look.

We’ll cover techniques for creating:

  • Pop-ups: We’ll make a map with icons to click for more info, in four different ways, using animation, buttons, and lines
  • Animated bar charts that make data presentation “cool”
  • Hamburger menus for page navigation, both an animated menu and simple Next and Previous page buttons

InDesign Scripts You Need Now

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If you’re not using scripts with InDesign, you’re not being nearly as efficient as you could be. And scripts are really easy to use! In fact, a bunch of useful scripts come with InDesign—you just need to know where to find them and how to use them.

Join us in this fast-paced session to learn:

  • Where to find must-have scripts
  • The fastest and easiest way to install a script and run it
  • Free scripts for managing your layouts, building calendars, and more
  • Amazing scripts to help with graphics, special characters, and frames

Interactive Documents: Which Format is Right For You?

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Are you interested in creating rich, interactive documents, but your background is primarily in print? It’s likely that your print design skills are more useful than you realize. This session will present an overview of your options, including interactive PDF, HTML, fixed-layout EPUB, Publish Online, and more!

We’ll explore:

  • What can and cannot be done with interactive PDFs
  • The strengths and weaknesses of fixed-layout EPUB and Publish Online
  • Free and commercial scripts for creating interactive HTML output
  • Delivering rich media presentations to sales teams
  • Reusing content from print projects

An InDesign User’s Guide to GREP

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GREP is one of the most powerful features in InDesign, but sadly it’s one of the least used! In this introductory session, we’ll get you up to speed with this amazing tool for finding, changing, and formatting text patterns.

We’ll look at some design samples and learn essential GREP techniques such as:

  • The basics of creating an expression to easily find and format text
  • Finding a range of characters
  • Automatically formatting specific text within a paragraph style, such as fractions, keywords, or a company name